What does the remainder of the viewers make of the present you’re watching? Past the odd gasp or giggle it may be arduous to inform however this audacious, tech-savvy manufacturing by devised theatre firm The Paper Birds repeatedly measures its impression. We use our telephones all through and, when prompted, choose from plenty of responses about how the scenes make us really feel.
It’s a check of empathy and, initially, preconceptions. This can be a story of pressured displacement, we’re instructed. The place would possibly the story be set, why has the character left dwelling and the way outdated are they? The screens on stage, inside a brief shelter designed by Imogen Melhuish, reveal our vary of assumptions. A later collection of skits will counsel how they’ve been influenced by the media.
Three performer-devisers, Lil McGibbon, Daz Scott and Kiren Virdee, share the function of a anonymous displaced individual but withhold most of their persona. They strap on rucksacks, hold shifting, enter a bureaucratic processing system and attain momentary lodging. The sequence of occasions is acquainted however the query the present raises is how completely different approaches to framing the journey might elevate our degree of empathy. The duty of chopping by means of statistics, and how one can recognise the plurality of displaced individuals’s experiences relatively than spotlight one particular person’s, is frequently raised. However does representing this largely by means of wordless bodily theatre start to assist us perceive or distance us from the character?
Really feel Me has a questing and provocative method however the result’s typically extra contemplative than emotional. The usage of comedy is uneven – a satire of headlines about refugees is a stinging rebuke of othering however the curiously jaunty scene, with muzak, in a queue for lodging strikes the unsuitable word. The closing acknowledgment, through which the trio voice unease at exploring the topic with out lived expertise, could be higher positioned earlier within the story and extra absolutely explored.
Author-director Jemma McDonnell and co-director Kylie Perry’s dynamic multimedia manufacturing, which incorporates live-filmed sequences, succeeds most in presenting these questions for a younger, digitally fluent viewers (it is suggested for over-13s). The interactive parts work seamlessly all through and it boldly ends by asking the viewers to fee its general impression, revealed on display.
The outcomes urged my fellow theatregoers had extra of an emotional response to an creative, well-performed present that in the end made me assume relatively than really feel. It’s a fascinating experiment however the journey taken by an Afghan refugee household in The Boy With Two Hearts, at Wales Millennium Centre in 2021, proved the ability of conventional character-driven drama as an empathy machine.
